A tale of two cites

By Carl 

So, it was the best of times last week as I took a week's break from the news and the grind of ordinary life and went on a tropical vacation to central America. Specifically, I went to the Honduran Bay Island of Roatan. And I couldn't help but take a critical eye to my surroundings.

Now, none of this should in any way, shape or form being construed as a reflection on either the people of or the government on the island. Everyone I met was very nice, hard-working, and friendly. But it was hard not to notice one glaring problem.

A little history is in order.

Honduras was originally two nations: Spanish Honduras, and British Honduras (now Belize). As you can imagine, Hondurans spoke Spanish, and Belizeans spoke English.

However, the Bay Islands were mostly populated by the Caracol people, originally black slaves from Jamaica and the Caymans who moved to the Bay Islands when Great Britain repealed slavery in the mid-1800s.

That population has moved out in large numbers over the past twenty years, primarily due to the devastation caused by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the island. Mainland Hondurans then moved in, as Roatan is one of the few places in Honduras where work is plentiful and easy to come by. It is a huge tourism destination, and has a deep water port that fits a cruise ship nicely.

Also, as part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, the waters off the island are teeming with fish. And scuba divers.

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Joan Rivers, national security threat

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This is rather amusing. From Think Progress:

The New York Daily News reports that comedian Joan Rivers was among the many travelers to get snared in the heightened-security frenzy that overtook airports after the December 25th failed terrorist attack. Rivers wasn't allowed on her Newark-bound flight in Costa Rica this past weekend by a "jittery Continental Airlines gate agent" who thought the two names on her passport, which reads "Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers," seemed "fishy." Rivers wrote of her experience.

"If I were going to make up an alias, I wouldn't pick Rosenberg. I'd pick Jolie or Pitt... Do terrorists wear Manolo Blahniks? I can tell you Donna Karan does not make anything that hides a bomb... I tried the tears; they didn't work. I tried reasoning. I couldn't bribe because I didn't have any money. I said 'I'm going to have a heart attack over this,' so the woman called the paramedics."

Rivers, who comes across as a pretentious bitch -- sorry, but wearing Manolo Blahniks doesn't make you a special person -- ultimately made it to San Jose, Costa Rica's capital, where she caught a flight home. Now, sure, there's a lot of craziness over security these days, heightened against post-12/25, and I certainly think a more sensible approach is preferable to suspect-everyone paranoia and panic.

But I'd say the system seems to be working just fine, don't you? Rivers, after all, is a threat to good taste and common decency everywhere. I'm just surprised it's her name the gate agent found "fishy." Why not her lack of facial expression beyond the one that's frozen there? Why not that she looks like an unnatural freak? Why not that she calls herself a comedian but isn't, and has rarely ever been, even remotely funny?

All good questions. Maybe she should be sent to Yemen for questioning.

It's a Doocy, all right

By Capt. Fogg

I think we'd all feel better if we stopped fretting about things and realized that the world we live in is no more than a huge, slowly revolving madhouse with no walls. It's the notion that things and people ought to make sense that drives us crazy -- because they don't. You only have to tune in the news for all the evidence you might need. Take Fox, for instance: any one of those shows with giggling night of the living dead zombies batting fallacies, conjectures, hypertrophied hyperbole and lies back and forth like a game of three-way badminton.

CNN is a communist organization, says Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends. Like "liberal," It's a term without fixed meaning, used often enough on Fox that it really means little else than that the victim doesn't have rabies and doesn't preach abject obedience to Fox approved authority and doesn't exhibit a Pavlovian rage response on cue. That certainly describes CNN, who sometimes actually does indulge in honest reportage rather than to derive stories from the Ouija board used by Fox and Friends. But, anyway, they are all Commies -- perhaps some of the few left in the real world and they don't need to tell you why or how. All the proof you need is that a former CNN employee, Mauricio Funes, has been elected president of El Salvador. Elected, not installed by a military insurgency or people's revolution or quasi legal action by the courts. Elected by popular vote. Elected as in "democracy."

So, anyway, by the law of sympathetic magic, or perhaps something even more arcane, because he isn't Augusto Pinochet or any of the other murderous, fascistic, peasant-slaughtering, protester-torturing, nun-raping, drug-money-laundering anti-communist generalissimos the U.S. traditionally supports and supplies, he's a communist and CNN is the "Communist News Network." What's more, the liberal party he belongs to has, according to Mr. Doocy, "allegedly ties to Caesar Chavez," a man that those without heads spinning from Fox Poisoning will remember is long dead. Of course, Doocy's doozy was not only to confuse Hugo with Caesar, but to confuse a baseless, irresponsible, malicious, and speculative accusation with fact. That's Fox. That's what Fox is about: the voices from Neptune for a mad, mad, mad world.

I happened to be perusing an auction catalog over coffee, early this afternoon; thinking about the things I might have been bidding on if George Bush's irregulars hadn't stolen everyone's money and there were a couple of lots of antique Chinese opium pipes and accessories. That's right, drug paraphernalia and legitimately so because you really can't smoke anything legal in an opium pipe.

Of course, the water pipes Tommy Chong once manufactured worked quite well with tobacco, that highly addictive, highly toxic and legal drug, yet Tommy went to prison and lost nearly everything he had. What's the difference between selling legal drug paraphernalia and illegal drug paraphernalia? Nothing beyond the personality involved. We have all sorts of laws enforced only to advance the careers of law enforcement, because, just like the traditional, criminally repressive generalissimos we traditionally support in Latin America, our Justice Department Buccaneers can make an honest man into a criminal as easily as Fox News can make Thomas Jefferson into a Communist and Jesus into Attila the Hun.

If you care about this insanity, you can't expect to survive intact and so I try very hard not to. Sure, I lost almost 80% of my net worth and the people who made that possible are fighting against any attempt to restore order; screaming like demons about commies and liberals and witches and welfare queens, but although I can still pay my bills, I can't afford to care. I've still got my house and my boat and a big ocean to float it in, and, as of today, I can even blog while afloat, hiding in my escape capsule from the madness of the world.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Anger mismanagement, McCain-style

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As Biloxi's Sun Herald is reporting, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican, has told the story of how his colleague John McCain once got into "a physical confrontation" on a diplomatic mission in Central America:

Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987. Cochran, McCain -- who had won election to the Senate that year -- and other members of a bipartisan committee of lawmakers called the Central American Negotiations Observer Group -- met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, head of the left-wing political party known as Sandinistas, about tensions in the region.

The atmosphere was tense, as the U.S. was pressing "pretty hard." Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.

"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

No punches were thrown and the two sat back down, Cochran said. The man, who appeared ruffled after the confrontation with McCain, was an Ortega associate, but Cochran said he was unsure of his identity.

Some might say that getting rough with the Sandinistas -- or at least with one of them -- was a sign of genuine toughness, that the Sandinistas deserved it, that McCain acted courageously even in the face of grave danger.

And, sure, it happened a long time ago. So what?

But what's interesting is that McCain is denying Cochran's allegation. And why would he not? Americans like their leaders tough, I suppose, but the story only reinforces the apt characterization of McCain as a guy with a terrible temper, a guy with some anger issues, even as a guy with a screw or two loose.

What's more, such outlandish and violent behaviour is hardly presidential. Does it not speak to a certain lack of judgement, especially in the face of grave danger, tension, and conflict, that is, when a president needs it most?

The denial is a matter of course. There's a lot about McCain, the real McCain lurking behind the faux maverick, straight-talker facade, that McCain doesn't want getting out.